‘For me, it was necessary to have moments and issues here that are difficult and uncomfortable – this is not just pretty, pretty chairs in a field,’ said Hew Locke, pictured with his work The Jurors.
Photograph: Tom D Morgan

There is little to suggest, when you walk across the water meadow of Runnymede, just a few miles from Windsor, that this field, usually awash with wildflowers, is the place where modern democracy and human rights were born. It is here, 800 years ago on Monday, that Magna Carta was sealed by King John, forming the foundations of the freedom of the individual, justice and equality that still resonate today internationally. Yet, aside from a memorial erected 50 years ago by the American Bar Association, the field is bare.

However, to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke has been commissioned to create a permanent artwork that will stand at Runnymede, not as a memorial, but as a celebration and discussion of the ongoing fight against injustice and inequality. The piece, titled the Jurors, consists of 12 bronze chairs placed in a circle around an invisible table – a direct reference to Clause 39 of Magna Carta, which states that no man can be imprisoned “except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land”.

Each throne has then been carved and embossed with images and symbols, all documenting a struggle for freedom and equal rights – as well as abuses of those – from the suffragettes and the suffering of the Australian aborigines to the assassination of gay activist Harvey Milk, the ongoing migration crisis on European seas and even Pussy Riot.

The Jurors features references to the Suffragettes, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, among many others. Photograph: Tom D Morgan/Tom D Morgan

“The piece is called the Jurors but the people complete it, and when they sit on the chairs, they too become the jurors,” says Locke as he walks around the statuesque chairs, making sure everything is in place. On Monday, the work will be officially unveiled at a ceremony attended by the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, as well as hundreds of dignitaries.

”These are not just moments from history – these are issues of injustice that still affect us now. The fight for gay rights, for women, for race equality, refugees, the impact of the internet on freedom of speech. The hope is the work will provoke people into discussing how Magna Carta affects us all, and also think about matters of injustice that might not be featured here. I’m imagining, when people sit down here, around them will be a hundred virtual chairs that symbolise another cause of injustice or inequality.”

Locke is an artist known best for his sculptures depicting members of the royal family embellished with colourful beads, sequins, plastic toys and all sorts of kitsch ephemera and admitted that, while his Magna Carta artwork was more “restrained”, it felt fitting to the site. Locke also described it as an “agony” trying to choose which 24 moments in history he could symbolise in the work. Yet he is also adamant that the piece should neither be thought of as a memorial nor a monument to a “parade of heroes”, and that the faces and symbols he has chosen to represent struggles are purposefully not the obvious ones.

Here, the fight against British colonial rule is depicted through the hand-spinning wheel, Gandhi’s symbol of resistance against British imported goods. Nelson Mandela is represented only by a carving of his cell, an image that Locke says goes wider, to represent the ongoing global injustice of prisoners locked up for their beliefs.

On the panel of another chair, Locke has depicted the struggle for race equality and the abolition of slavery through a portrait of Phillis Wheatley, the first black American poet to be published, and the fight for to get votes for women is illustrated by Lillie Lenton, a suffragette who was branded a terrorist and locked up for burning down Kew Gardens’ tea rooms.

When he first embarked on the piece, Locke was determined it would not be a work that shied away from the uncomfortable truths of history. He said: “For me, it was necessary to have moments and issues here that are difficult and uncomfortable – this is not just pretty, pretty chairs in a field. But it also needed to speak to the complexity of these issues and question whether justice was served.”

Locke’s connection between past injustices and current politics is particularly evident in two chairs that stand adjacent to each other, one depicting the British ship, the Zong, whose captain threw 133 slaves overboard in 1781 to claim insurance, and another showing the familiar image of an overcrowded boat full of migrant refugees. This idea of human lives as cargo and immigrants being stripped of their of human rights, said Locke, resonates as strongly today as it did when the case of the Zong was in the courts. “This is not a piece about accusation, I tried to create a balance here that was reflective of the scales of justice – and that was tricky,” he added.

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As part of the unveiling of the piece on Monday, British poet Owen Sheers has also been commissioned to create a special performance piece responding to Locke’s work and the thinking around it. Sheers said he had based the piece around the structure of Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, which is inscribed on the back of one chair.

Sheers said it felt like a particularly interesting moment in time to celebrate Magna Carta and the freedoms it set out, when debates around the scrapping of the Human Rights Act and cuts to legal aid are present in the UK. “I certainly feel there are some ironies of ambassadors from around the world coming together to celebrate clause 39 when so many of their countries have been disregarding it,” he said. “You could argue, for example, that Guantánamo bay has been the most prominent disregarding of clause 39 we have seen in years.

“It does feel ironic and slightly brazen for David Cameron and representatives from the Conservative party to stand there and openly celebrate Magna Carta while also claiming in their first hundred days of power they are going to scrap the Human Rights Act. It’s extraordinary.”